Teachers' union opposes potential BUSD supt. hire
The Burbank Teachers Assn. sent an email blast to its membership Monday evening urging public school employees and other community members to voice their opposition to Burbank Unified superintendent candidate Matthew Hill, who currently works in the Los Angeles public school system.
The BUSD board of education scheduled a town hall-style meeting today from 3:30 to 6 p.m. at John Burroughs High School, with the stated purpose of giving people "an opportunity to ask questions of Matthew R. Hill, Superintendent of Schools candidate, and learn more about his background and qualifications."
The BTA release, however, asks people to show up during the regular board meeting on Thursday at 6 p.m. to urge the board to reject Hill and continue its search for a new leader. That meeting will be held at Burbank City Hall.
Specifically, union officials expressed concern that Hill has never worked as a teacher or a principal, as well as his involvement in the much-maligned iPad roll-out at LAUSD.
The BTA also raised concerns about Hill’s involvement with the implementation of a $130-million student information system at LAUSD that became a technological debacle.
When the system went online last fall, it overloaded the district’s database servers, which required emergency re-engineering, according to the Los Angeles Times.
For days and weeks afterward, many teachers couldn’t enter grades or attendance or even figure out which students were enrolled in class, the Times reported.
In a letter written last October, then LAUSD Supt. John Deasy said the fixes required to repair the system may take up to a year.
Though the final open seat on the Burbank Unified school board will be determined following the general election tonight, none of the new members will be formally seated on the board for several weeks, meaning the selection of the new superintendent may occur without their input.
Current Burbank Supt. Jan Britz is retiring at the end of the school year. Teachers' union opposes potential BUSD supt. hire - Burbank Leader:
Things have worked out so well at LAUSD Burbank should give it a whirl!
Once Broad alumni are working inside the education system, they naturally favor hiring other Broadies, which ups the leverage. A clear picture of this comes from Los Angeles. The foundation is based there and exerts formidable influence over the LA Unified School District (LA Unified), the second largest in the nation. At the start of 2010, Broad Residency alums working at LA Unified included Matt Hill, who oversees the district’s Public School Choice project that turns schools over to independent managers (Broad pays Hill’s $160,000 salary); Parker Hudnut, executive director of the district’s innovation and charter division (Kathi Littmann, his predecessor, was also a Broad resident); Yumi Takahashi, the budget director; Marshall Tuck, chief executive of the nonprofit that manages schools for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Mark Kieger-Heine, chief operating officer of the same nonprofit; and Angela Bass, its superintendent of instruction. In June 2010, the Board of Education hired Broad Academy alumnus John Deasy as deputy superintendent of LA Unified (he’s a likely candidate for the superintendent’s job). At the time of hiring, Deasy was deputy director of education at the Gates Foundation.
Broad casts a long shadow over LA Unified, but other foundations also invest. A $4.4 million grant from the LA-based Wasserman Foundation, $1.2 million from Walton, and smaller grants from Ford and Hewlett are paying the salaries of more than a dozen key senior staffers in the district. They work on projects favored by the foundations.
